Tags:

One of the best travel books ever written (indeed, one of my favorite books, period, ever) is The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find: your best bet is to track down the 2003 Pallas Athene paperback with an introduction by Anita Brookner.

Tags:

Vernon Smith is a true giant in the world of economics, and his memoir has now received a rave review from Tyler Cowen (who admittedly might be biased, given that Smith is a fellow at Cowen’s Mercatus Center). So the obvious question about the book is this: why was this wide-ranging memoir from a Nobel laureate self-published?

Tags:

It’s one of the most eagerly-awaited books of 2009, and it features “a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang”. More generally, there’s a “splendid cast of characters [which] includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish”, including “the goats and the few who saw what the emperor was wearing”.

Tags:

Back in January, Google’s Eric Schmidt was dismissive when asked about whether he had any interest in buying the New York Times, although he did say he was interested in doing a peculiar thing where he would “merge without merging”, whatever that meant.

Tags:

Back in March, I wondered why the NYT was breaking the web, yet was hopeful that it was some temporary snafu, and that it would be fixed sharpish. But no — it’s still insanely broken, and Thomas Crampton is only one of hundreds of journalists who have seen their careers thoughtlessly erased by an idiotic marketing stunt.